Tensions grow as children and parents are separated at US border
Compiled from Dispatches
Tension is growing in Washington over the US administration’s zero tolerance policy, letting border security agents separate the children of immigrants trying to enter the country illegally, CBS News reported. Critics say there is no law requiring families to be split up. President Donald Trump has blamed Democrats for his administration’s controversial new policy of taking children away from parents caught entering the US illegally on the southern border, a practice the White House says is a deterrent to illegal immigration.
The president’s criticism of the “horrible” policy comes less than a month after US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” approach to illegal border crossings. “If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” he warned, ABC News reported.
In a Twitter post on Saturday, Trump accused Democrats of protecting violent MS-13 gang members who he says illegally breached the border from Mexico and Central America.
“Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the US Catch and Release, Lottery and Chain must also go with it and we MUST continue building the WALL! DEMOCRATS ARE PROTECTING MS-13 THUGS,” Trump wrote in his tweet.
Also a White House spokesman said in a statement that Democrats are responsible for the separations “because they refuse to close border loopholes that prevent those families from being swiftly returned home.”
Ivanka Trump faced an online backlash for tweeting what one critic called a “tone deaf” photo of herself cuddling her son as outrage grows over a federal government policy to separate the children of undocumented migrants from their parents.
The eldest daughter of President Donald Trump, who serves as an advisor to her father, posted the picture of her with her son on Sunday, with the caption: “My <3! #Sundaymorning.”
Critics were quick to point to a “zero tolerance” policy announced by Attorney Sessions that authorizes border security agents to take away the children of people who enter the United States unlawfully.
Between May 6 and May 19, 638 adults were referred for prosecution. Those adults brought with them a total of 658 children, all of whom were separated from the adults they traveled with.
1,500 children remain missing
Federal officials have lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children that showed up at the southwest border alone and were placed in the care of sponsors.
The government places such children in foster homes, but Steven Wagner, a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services told a congressional committee last month the government was “unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,475” minors after attempting to contact their sponsors in the last three months of 2017, AFP reported.
It is feared they have been sold to human traffickers and sexually or physically abused.
The administration denied the reports. The Department of Health and Human Services said the sponsors of the children simply did not respond when a call was made to see if they require additional services.